"ARCHITECTUS OMNIBUS?" EXHIBITION OF PROJECTS FOR A BETTER SOCIETY

The exhibition has been organised jointly by Tabakalera, Instituto Cervantes and Goethe-Institut Madrid and offers ten proposals by Spanish and German architects who insist on the sustainable awareness of architecture through new attitudes and ways of understanding the profession.

Located in the plaza of Tabakalera, the exhibition will be open daily throughout the month during the centre’s opening hours. It will also include meetings and parallel activities run by the local architectural group, M-etxea.

After being held at Instituto Cervantes in Berlin from May to July 2015, the Madrid exhibition hall La Arquería from October to December 2015 and the Würth Museum La Rioja from April to May 2016, as part of Concéntrico 02, the Festival of Architecture and Design of Logroño, the exhibition can be visited at Tabakalera during the month of October.

The project is part of the 6th Hispano-German Cultural Encounter organised and produced by Goethe-Institut and Instituto Cervantes to foster the exchange of ideas and closer cooperation between Spanish and German cultural players.

Architectus Omnibus? shows the result of the call made by Goethe-Institut and Instituto Cervantes in 2015 for Spanish and German architecture studios and students to come up with new solutions for society’s needs.

The call is based on the decalogue drawn up by the architect Andrés Jaque for the project: Freshlatino 2, a platform for architecture studios that operates in the Latin-American context and on the boundaries between material design, social innovation and activism. The decalogue shows how the projects confront and offer alternatives to hegemonic architectural practices. The decalogue comprises the following concepts: “events", “de-blackboxing", "dispute", "empowerment", “laboratorise", “anthropo-no-centrism" “redistributions", "reappropriations", "resilience" and "solidarity".

As a result, the projects selected for the exhibition sit in the context of social responsibility, in which creativity can be seen in the results and working methods. Multidiscipline approaches, collaborative practices, recycling, sustainability, innovation, ecology, experimentation, recontextualisation and self-construction are some of the many profiles of these proposals, which are committed to proximity and locality, to citizen empowerment and the revival of the city and the rural environment.

The exhibition will feature a programme of parallel activities run by members of the M-Etxea collective. On 5 and 19 October, there will be two days of free, open meetings held in the exhibition space.